The Second Rule of Prepping

One of the most common mistakes people new to prepping make is storing the wrong food. It usually begins with watching numerous YouTube videos from other master preppers which leads them down the road to five-gallon buckets and mylar bags full of rice and beans. In a short period of time, they have months’ or years’ worth of rice and beans sitting on the shelf, ready for that next big disaster to happen.

Now, there is nothing wrong with rice and beans. They are the perfect survival food. They contain a good number of calories and protein to keep the body running. They are dry commodities that store easily and for a long time. They are a staple that should be in every prepper’s food reserves.

The problem with rice and beans is that many people don’t eat them as part of their normal meal rotation. They are great now and then but if you had to live on them for every meal, you will quickly develop food fatigue and begin to hate meal time. When a body isn’t a custom to eating things, like beans, it could bring some gastric distress and discomfort when you suddenly start consuming large quantities of these foods.

We prepare so we are ready for when normal life is interrupted by an event. We prepare so that we can keep our lives as close to normal when the world around us is not. Storing large quantities of food that we don’t normally eat makes as much sense as storing cases of condoms in a convent. Having shelves full of #10 cans of all things freeze dried that will only be opened when the lights go out for weeks on end is a bad investment of your prepping dollar. Instead, you should be practicing proper food rotation and be eating from your stores.

“Store what you eat, eat what you store.”

Most of what we consume on a daily basis comes off from the store shelves. If they can be stored on the store shelves they can be stored on your shelves as well. Do they have a five-, ten-, or twenty-five-year shelf life? Absolutely not. But let’s be honest, who wants to eat food that has been sitting on the shelves for twenty years? Well, you don’t have to.

I’ll talk about how to do proper food rotation in future blog. For now, we’ll look at one item to see how this idea works. I love mayo. It is my Franks Red Hot. I put that @#$% on everything. Mayo makes a meal enjoyable and surviving without it takes a simple pleasure away. My favorite brand of mayo has an unopened shelf life of about three months past the expiration date when properly stored. The expiration date on the jars I buy are usually four to five months in the future. It usually takes me a month to make it through a jar of mayo. Doing proper rotation of first in/first out, and keeping one extra jar in the refrigerator, I can safely keep up to seven months of mayo in my ready reserve. If we ever have an event that lasts more than seven months, we have much greater things to worry about than having mayo on my pastrami on rye.

Not everything we eat can be stored on the shelf. Meat is the first to come to mind. Meat has to stay refrigerated or frozen and even there it has a limited useability. They do make canned meats that you can have in your ready reserve. Pork, chicken, and fish are all available in cans. Yes, we are talking about things like Spam and sardines. Foods many people wrinkle their nose at. Nothing cures food snobbery faster than having an empty stomach for three days.

But if store-bought canned meat is not your cup of tea you can always can your own. Beef, chicken, pork, and fish can all be canned at home. Government agencies in charge of food safety will tell you that this is unsafe and should not be done. There are thousands of preppers, including me, who do it and have found it to be a safe way to store meats that does not require refrigeration. Only you can decide what is right and safe for you and your family. I can only tell you what works for me.

So, if you are new to prepping, instead of going out and blowing a wad of hard-earned, over-taxed money on a year’s supply of freeze-dried foods in cans and buckets start by squirreling away those things you use on a daily basis. Every week, buy one extra of a few items you normally buy and soon you will have a ready reserve of food for that event you are prepping for that you can eat from every day. That is money better spent. Your stomach will thank you later.